That’s right. I sold my Camper. And, I didn’t mean to do it, but circumstances came together just right and I let it go!

As I have mentioned in other posts, my wife and I accepted the increasing physical limitations we have as we grow older, and we finally gave up on our big motorhome, almost two years ago.

But, we still love the camping lifestyle and after a few months we decided to find a nice used camper and place it in a year-round campsite in Virginia near our family and remaining friends. 

We spend several months looking and we finally found a nice fifth-wheel in SC, had it hauled to Virginia and set up on our campsite there.

Then, we essentially became sporadic year-round campers rather than the typical fair-weather campers we had become in our motorhome. By this I mean that we were able to visit our old hometown at any time we wanted, regardless of the weather. This saved us quite a bit on hotel bills, and the costs of constantly eating out. So, it seemed to be a good solution for us.

This did work great for us, but as we drove to and from Virginia, we would always look wistfully at the motorhomes heading the other way on the interstate highways. In other words, we missed being able to just pick up and travel to any interesting place we thought of and then leisurely explore the local sights and attractions as we had done for years.

My wife said it was the Gypsy in us. And, I guess I agree; once you have traveled in a camper for months at a time you do miss the lifestyle.

So, while we were recently visiting our family, and enjoying our camper, we finally decided to look into maybe selling our fifth-wheel camper and picking up a nice, smaller and low-cost motorhome that would allow us to still take the occasional trip and at the same time visit our family whenever we wanted.

In fact, we talked about how we could turn the 13-hour one-way trip into a week or so of finding back road campgrounds and making each trip an adventure rather than an interstate travel ordeal.

Well. I got online and did a little research on the value of my fifth-wheel and we didn’t do anything for several days.

Then, our daughter came by and my wife told her what we were thinking of. She was excited because she told us she had several friends with older campers in the campground who really liked our camper and had commented that they would be interested if we ever decided to sell ours.

So, suddenly I was under pressure to name a price. Of course, I had already done this in my head, so I told her my price. I figured, like all campers, it would sit there for six months or so, I would run ads on the web, and eventually I would find a buyer. I didn’t think any more about it, until two days later.

It was a beautiful day and my son-in-law called and asked if a friend could look at our camper. I was surprised, but I said yes, and the guy and his wife were there within an hour. I walked them through the camper, showing off the niceties and answering their questions.

We finally sat down to talk more and he said he liked the but was going to look at a few others. This was fine with me, because we were planning on several more weeks of camping before we actually left and went back to Florida.

The guy left, and a neighbor, two sites over asked what was going on. I told her and her friends, who immediately said they might be interested and could they see the camper. This really took me back, to get so much sudden interest in our camper.

So, I did another tour of the camper and as we were all standing at the door for them to leave, the first guy suddenly walked up to the door and said, that he would buy the camper.

Our neighbors as well as my wife and I were stunned by the quick decision, and it only took another ten minutes for us to work out the details of our deal.

The buyer left with a smile on his face, and my wife and I sat down, still a little stunned, and opened a bottle of Chardonnay.

We decided that we had several things to celebrate. One, we had just sold a camper faster than we had ever dreamed, and second we now had a new adventure to enjoy.

Oh, we did have to leave earlier than we thought, and we had to clean out our personal things and store them over the next few days. But, we were now on the prowl for a motorhome that would suit our needs. And now, once we had the right RV, we had new places to be and things to do when we got there. HOORAH!

by Don Bobbitt, 2014

Copyright, Don Bobbitt, 2014, All Rights Reserved